Space Photos of the Week: A Supermassive Black Hole Burps

A view of the galaxy NGC 5195, home to a supermassive black hole located in the upper right hand corner of the image. The black hole has powerful, active eruptions or “burps” of debris.

This is an x-ray close-up of a nearby supermassive black hole in the NGC 5195. Black holes are known for “eating” stars and gas, sometimes burping debris from their center. The NGC 5195 black hole features two powerful bursts that may have occurred when the galaxy came into contact with a large spiral galaxy M51 millions of years ago.

Astronomers are finding dozens of the fastest stars in our galaxy by locating their bow shocks. The shocks occur when massive stars zip through space, pushing material ahead of them in the same way that water piles up in front of a boat. The stars also produce high-speed winds that smack into this compressed material. The end result is pile-up of heated material that glows in infrared light (colored red in these images). These “runaway stars” are supposed to be around 8 to 30 times the mass of the sun.

Eta Carinae is the most luminous and massive stellar system with 10,000 light-years, and is best known for an enormous eruption in the 1840s that hurled at least 10 times the sun’s mass into space, leaving an expanding veil of gas and dust. Though the star is rare, astronomers have now found five objects with similar properties known as “Eta twins” for the first time. They will help scientists better understand this brief phase in the life of a massive star.

Astronomers have made the most detailed study yet of an extremely massive young galaxy cluster using three of NASA’s Great Observatories. This multi-wavelength image shows this galaxy cluster IDCS 1426, a rare object located 10 billion light years from Earth and weighing almost 500 trillion Suns. The cluster has important implications for understanding how these mega-structures formed and evolved early in the Universe. IDCS 1426 is the most massive galaxy cluster detected at such an early age.

This photo showcases the NGC 4845, a spiral galaxy with a supermassive and super-hungry black hole. Astronomers determine the mass of black holes by the gravitational pull of the galaxy’s innermost stars. NGC 4845’s black hole is suspected to be hundreds of thousands times heavier than the sun. In 2013, it produced a giant flare as it devoured an object believed to be many times more massive than Jupiter, like a brown dwarf star or a large planet.

This image, constructed from more than six years of observations by NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope, is the first to show how the entire sky appears at energies between 50 billion (GeV) and 2 trillion electron volts (TeV). A diffuse glow fills the sky and is brightest in the middle of the map, along the central plane of our galaxy. The famous Fermi Bubbles, first detected in 2010, appear as red extensions north and south of the galactic center and are much more pronounced at these energies. Discrete gamma-ray sources include pulsar wind nebulae and supernova remnants within our galaxy, as well as distant galaxies called blazars powered by supermassive black holes. Labels show the highest-energy sources, all located within our galaxy and emitting gamma rays exceeding 1 TeV.

A new, high-resolution image of Pluto includes the center of Sputnik Planum, an informally named plain that forms the left side of Pluto’s “heart.” Mission scientists believe the pattern of the cells stems from the slow thermal convection of the nitrogen-dominated ices. The darker patch at the center of the image is likely a dirty block of water ice “floating” in denser solid nitrogen, and which has been dragged to the edge of a convection cell.